Saskatchewan’s tragic history
Province consistently has one of the highest fatality rates in Canada
If a bus crash like the one that has shattered the small city of Humboldt, Sask., were going to happen anywhere, the grim reality is that it was statistically most likely to happen in Saskatchewan.
Between 2007 and 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, Saskatchewan had either the highest or second-highest rate of road fatalities in the country.
Death rates have been worse only in Prince Edward Island and Yukon, both of which have small populations that can make for wild swings in statistical data. A single-car collision, for example, can double the per capita fatality rate in a given year.
Saskatchewan by contrast, which has a population of more than one million, has suffered consistently high fatality rates — double the rate of Manitoba in 2010, double the rate of British Columbia in 2011, double the rate of Alberta in 2012 and double the national average every year since 2008.
Among the provinces, Saskatchewan also had the highest rate of deaths per licensed driver between 2007 and 2014.
Friday’s deadly crash, in which a collision between a transport truck and the team bus of Humboldt’s junior hockey team claimed 15 lives, occurred at a remote Saskatchewan intersection already marked by death. About 20 years ago, a family of six was killed at the intersection of Highway 335 and Highway 35.
A row of crosses still stands at the site.
The recent tragedy is also the second deadly bus crash in a generation involving a Saskatchewan team called the Broncos. In 1986, a coach bus carrying the members of the Swift Current Broncos swerved off Saskatchewan’s Highway 1 after hitting black ice, killing four players.
Despite the awful toll, the most recent crash is not the deadliest in the province either, a grim distinction that belongs to a May 1980 incident in which a bus loaded with CPR workers collided with a tanker truck near Swift Current, killing 22, all of them young men or teenagers.
In a province where flat, straight roads are the norm, most road fatalities — as with the Humboldt crash — have occurred at intersections. Indeed, the danger of Saskatchewan intersections has earned special attention from government officials in the past.
“There’s several different things we can do on the intersection side of things,” Jennifer Ehrmantraut,
with Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Highways, told the province’s special committee on traffic safety in 2013. She noted several possible engineering solutions: Amber flashing lights, turning lanes and rumble strips that warn of an approaching stop sign.
The site of the Humboldt Broncos crash only had a stop sign and flashing lights without the rumble strips that are common at many remote Prairie intersections. A number of trees also obscure visibility.
Investigators are still looking into the cause of this crash. But aside from the occasional collision with wildlife, Saskatchewan’s fatal crashes are almost exclusively due to human error: Impaired drivers, distracted drivers, speeding drivers and not using seatbelts.
While there is no evidence that alcohol contributed to the Humboldt crash — police detained the driver of the truck briefly after the collision, then released him — impaired driving is of particular concern in Saskatchewan.
In 2015, the province’s rate of impaired driving incidents was
nearly double that of Alberta and nearly three times the national average. At 1.1 deaths per 100,000, the province’s rate of “impaired driving causing death” was also twice as high as Manitoba (0.5) and more than five times higher than Quebec or Ontario (0.2).
“We see young and old, male and female drive after drinking alcohol,” Regina resident Murray Wale wrote in a 2016 letter to the Leader-Post soon after losing a co-worker to impaired driving.
Before Saskatchewan’s 2016 provincial election, five candidates
(three from the governing Saskatchewan Party, two from the NDP) — including current Premier Scott Moe — revealed they had impaired driving convictions.
Moe was convicted for drunk driving at the age of 18. During his run for leadership, he spoke openly about an unrelated collision in 1997 that left one woman dead. “It’s a day that I live with each and every day in my life,” he said about the collision, in which alcohol was not a factor.
Saskatchewan is showing progress in its efforts to combat its high rates of auto fatalities, in part because of stricter enforcement of impaired driving, including vehicle seizure for drivers who are caught with a blood-alcohol content between 0.04 and 0.08.
In February, the province announced that only 102 people had been killed on Saskatchewan roads in 2017, the lowest number since 1954 and a significant drop below the yearly average of 145 deaths over the previous decade.